How the Freaky Octopus Can Help us Understand the Human Brain

In this month’s WIRED magazine, my article “Alien Intelligence: How the Freaky Octopus Can Help us Understand the Human Brain,” dives into the deeply mysterious octopus brain. This was no easy task, however. The octopus’s “smarts” are distributed throughout its body–from its suckers, to its arms, to its central brain–an arrangement researchers refer to as “embodied cognition.” It would be as if your arm could make decisions on its own and even coordinate independently with your other arm. To try to wrap my own mind around this I spoke with some brilliant biologists and philosophers. And spent a long time pondering what it might be like to be an octopus…